"We can only see a few thousand stars at most with our unaided eyes. These are a mixture of stars which are nearby, and bright stars which are further away; but they are only a tiny fraction of the 100,000,000,000 stars in our own galaxy."

100 billion

The night sky has always been a source of endless wonder and
speculation. It is the origin of innumerable number of myths,
legends and other stories. Yet while the number of ideas and answers
to the mystery of the sky is unfathomable, so is the number of
stars out there.

When looking up at a night sky, only a small amount of stars
can been seen by the naked eye. In fact it is an amount so small
that it is a comparable to a handful of sand on the beach. While
the exact number can't be known just yet, many estimates have
been given.

Stars are giant spheres of gas, mainly hydrogen and helium.
Most of them, with the exception of the Sun, are trillions of
miles away. Because they are so far, they seem to us like little
specks of light, but in actuality they can be millions of miles
wide in diameter. Stars are located in galaxies, but a galaxy
contains more than just stars. Clouds of dust and gas, called
nebulae, are where stars are born.

In our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, there is a predicted 3
billion to 100 billion stars. It is impossible at this point to
know which the true value is; it may even be larger than thought.
So while the stories and myths live on about the night sky, the
exact number of stars is still not known, as space is truly the
final frontier.